Are you overtraining?

In December 2010, Peter Harris* looked in the mirror and told his paunchy 37-year-old reflection “no more”. At that very moment, he hated the guy staring back at him. His losing battle against his fluctuating weight and ever-expanding gut was driving him to despair. The cycle was by now depressingly familiar: he would steel himself to eat well and exercise regularly, sticking to the strict regimen for at least a few months. But soon enough, he’d begin to skip workouts and the lunchtime side orders of hot chips would reappear. From there, his resolve would crumble and the old belt notches would be called back into service.

By December that year, he’d hit 108 kilograms – before the Christmas pudding was even served. It was at that point Harris decided that if he was ever going to like the man in the mirror, he had to find another way.

“Every time you do it, it gets harder,” recalls Harris, a technical services manager for South Australian Lotteries. “Now that I was nearing 40, I thought, ‘I’ve got to do something and make it permanent’.” And so he pledged to get in serious shape by the following Christmas.

Related link: Four ways to tell if you're overtraining

Harris was as good as his word. Joining his local Adelaide gym, he embarked on a merciless training program, working out once, sometimes twice, every day. A typical week consisted of boxing on Monday morning, followed by the high-intensity intervals of a body attack class in the afternoon. Tuesday was weight training, while Wednesday consisted of boxing in the morning and weight training in the evening. Thursday saw another double session of weights and body attack, and on Friday he threw in some circuit training. The weekend brought no respite, either. Saturday involved an extended boxing session; on Sunday it was back to hitting the weights.

Alongside this brutal program, Harris overhauled his diet. He stopped drinking during the week and downsized his weekend binges to just a couple of beers. Previously, he’d wolfed down pub grub or Chinese takeaway with his workmates. Now he brought in a healthy packed lunch instead. At dinner, he eschewed his beloved schnitzels and chips for lean meat and grilled vegetables.

The results were impressive. The fat melted away as Harris sculpted his body into the defined physique he’d always dreamt of. Within four months, he’d lost 18 kilograms and could happily power through two-and-a-half hours of exercise classes back-to-back. Setting aside somewhat broken sleep patterns – he’d started waking every three hours on the dot – he’d never looked and felt better, or been stronger, in his entire life. His only concern was that he kept getting ill: bouts of flu, followed closely by a series of colds and chest infections.

At first, Harris put his underperforming immune system down to having two school-age boys in the house. But then another thought began to nag at him, one that wouldn’t go away: could it possibly be that all the exercise was making him sick?

Like most conditions dubbed “syndromes”, overtraining syndrome (OTS) is difficult to identify and diagnose, as there is no universal definition or diagnostic consensus. Symptoms vary from one person to the next, with most cases assumed to go unreported as sufferers dismiss constant fatigue as a natural by-product of hard training.

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What is known is that overtraining is caused by a sharp increase in the intensity or frequency of your training, without allowing for sufficient recovery. And it doesn’t happen overnight. When you push yourself too hard for a short period and need a few days to recover, you’re suffering from what’s commonly referred to as “overreaching”. True overtraining occurs when your recovery takes weeks, or even months.

The trouble is, finding the right balance is elusive. No-one wants to flog themselves to the point of physical burnout. But at the same time, to improve your performance you have to push yourself harder, whether that means increasing the load on the bar or raising the intensity or frequency of your training sessions.

Further muddying the waters is that training can’t be isolated as the only contributing factor to the syndrome. In their book Performance Incompetence and Regeneration in Sport, sports scientists at Germany’s Ulm University ventured that overtraining tends to result not only from intensity, but an accumulation of life stressors that can include loss of sleep, work pressures and relationship difficulties. Most people discount the importance of these external factors – to their detriment.

So, how can you tell if you’re overtraining? It’s not easy. Warning signs are broad and many, and include decreased performance and coordination; persistent muscle or joint pain; increased rate of injuries; disturbed sleep patterns; diminished appetite; weight loss, nausea and elevated resting heart rate; fatigue; allergic reactions; and persistent head colds and upper respiratory tract infections, thought to result from an immune system short-circuited by excess adrenaline.

Related link: 18 ways to stick to a workout

The challenge of self-diagnosis is acknowledged by Victor Popov, former Australian Olympic team physiotherapist. Is your latest sub-par effort the result of overtraining, or are you just having a bad week?

“To tell if you’re overtraining, you need more than one parameter,” explains Popov, who has recently worked with the Brisbane Lions and Test all-rounder Shane Watson. “For example, often the first thing you see is an elevated heart rate for the same workload and you feel like the exertion is a lot greater. You might be riding your bike at 30 kilometres an hour and your heart rate’s quite elevated, whereas the week before it wasn’t.”

The same logic also applies for aching muscles. According to Popov, muscle soreness can be a normal consequence of a hard workout, but can become an issue when it’s persistent and won’t resolve itself, particularly if you’re not doing anything dramatically different in your training program. “None of the symptoms on their own equals overtraining,” he says. “It’s the combination – if you say, ‘I’m performing worse and I’m sorer than I normally am’.”

Another key symptom to watch out for, says Popov, is poor sleep. “If you have sleep disturbance, interrupted sleep or poor-quality sleep, or you wake thinking you haven’t slept when you have, that’s indicative of an overtrained state.”

With so many aspects to keep track of, it’s no wonder overtraining is a largely hidden condition for enthusiastic amateurs. “It takes a lot of discipline in the monitoring of your training,” admits Kate Kraschnefski, Queensland training manager at the Australian Institute of Fitness. “You have to take into account not only your volume of training, but also ask yourself a list of questions every day: how sore are my muscles? How mentally alert am I? How motivated am I to train? How well have I been sleeping? Have I had any colds and flus?”

If alarm bells are ringing, it’s time to take a step back in your training. Leading American exercise physiologist Roy Stevenson, from Seattle University’s Centre for the Study of Sports and Exercise, advocates reducing your training for 3-5 days if you’ve only overreached for a few workouts.

Related link: Are you over-training?

But if you’re already amassing overtraining symptoms after weeks of pushing past your limits? You’ll need to start by reducing your training load by 40 per cent for between 10 and 14 days to achieve full recovery. In more extreme cases, you might need to ease off for up to three weeks to regain your equilibrium.

How, then, do you avoid overdoing it in the first place? When it comes to prevention, experts agree that periodised programs are best (see TRIMP Your Training, below). Introducing a lower-intensity, lower-duration week into your training program every 3-4 weeks will give your muscle tissue the chance to recover properly. Scheduling in rest periods isn’t as easy as it sounds, though, especially if you’ve developed an addiction to exercise.

“If I have to miss a day, I get quite agitated,” admits Harris. “There’s almost an unrealistic thought in my head that I’m going to lose all my fitness if I miss one session. I just get frustrated because that’s my routine. I suppose there’s also a minor fear that one session will become two, three, a week, a month . . . ”

Harris often finds that he’ll cheat and end up training when he’s supposed to rest. “Last week, I sat down and said, ‘Okay, it’s time to slow down a bit’. I wasn’t going to go to body attack on Monday night – but I still did.”

Big mistake, warns Kraschnefski. “The most successful professional athletes in the world wouldn’t feel that guilt, because they know that the negative consequences far outweigh that week of rest,” she says. “Recovery isn’t a separate part of training; recovery is the training.”

*Not his real name.